Virginia’s attorney general says DHS may have violated state election law after whistleblower report

RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — Virginia’s attorney general said Thursday that the Department of Homeland Security may have violated several state laws after a whistleblower accused its employees of misrepresenting themselves on voter lookup tools to hunt for noncitizen voters.

In a letter obtained by The Associated Press, Attorney General Jay Jones demanded that DHS confirm in writing whether it had directed anyone to access Virginia voters’ information without first obtaining permission from those voters.

“Virginia Election Code does not permit disclosure of this protected information to the federal government without a court order,” he wrote in the letter to Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin. The state explicitly limits its voter lookup tools to individuals who attest under penalty of law that they are looking up their own records.

The AP has asked DHS for comment on the letter.

Jones also asked Mullin to preserve all related records, including access logs, correspondence and training materials mentioned in the whistleblower report.

The anonymous report, published Monday by Democratic Senate leaders, includes transcripts of a DHS training for a group of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services staffers, who it says were forced in late August to drop other work, complete a less than two-hour training and begin running DHS-provided lists of people through state voter registration systems to find “unlawful voters.”

The whistleblower contends that agents have been asked to review 40 individuals per day, giving them about 12 minutes to determine whether each person is a legal voter and create federal records of anyone who is not.

President Donald Trump’s administration has alleged that noncitizen voting could be a significant source of fraud in the November midterm elections, even as research shows voting by people who are not citizens is extremely rare. The Justice Department has sued to force the release of detailed voter data in 30 states and the District of Columbia, though it has not yet succeeded in those cases.